Alright so, we’re a few weeks into the school year and I think we’re due for a status report. Things are…..insane, to say the least. There is always so much to do. Always. I think that if I allowed myself I would have a to-do list long enough to reach well into next summer and I still would never finish it. I’m working on accepting that and letting it go. I will never get everything done. And that’s okay.

The best way I can describe the last few weeks is as an intense rollercoaster of emotions. Some days I feel like I’m doing a decent job (never a great job, but decent will do) and that the students are learning things. Other days I’m having an emotional breakdown, feel like no one learned anything for the entire seven hours we were together, and hiding in my room during my planning period.

But, the students seem to enjoy being in my classroom. They’re kind and eager and curious. They challenge me every day in literally every way I could imagine. There is SO MUCH to learn in first grade, I had no idea. It’s a completely different ball game from pre-k (which I miss dearly) but it is a lot of fun getting to explore so many different topics together.

This post feels like a jumbled mess which is how my brain feels about 99% of the time. But we’re getting through and it’s getting a tiny bit better each week. So, I think we’ll make it. I hope.

Hey yo! August, we did it! I’m not going to lie, I was happy to see August go. It was a month full of a lot of anxiety and anticipation in regards to my new job and moving to a new apartment. Overall, I was ready to get into a groove with everything and stop worrying about the unknowns of it all. I accomplished most of my August goals, let’s look back real quick.

August Goals

– Pack and move to a new apartment! In Adams Morgan! With a roommate! On the top floor of a brand new apartment building with A FULL SIZE FRIDGE. God bless.Done and done and I LOVE IT SO MUCH.

– Set up my classroom! I’m teaching first grade this year at a new school and I’m feeling all the nerves.Done and done, but still feeling all the nerves.

– Go to yoga at least ten times. One of the best parts of 2016 so far has been finding a form of exercise I actually really enjoy, but sometimes sitting on the couch is just so damn tempting. I went to yoga 6 times last month, so a ways to go to keep up with this one.

– Take at least ten evening walks. To clear my head, get some exercise, and keep up with the multitudes of podcasts I’m currently subscribed to.I was really diligent about this one and went on more than 10 walks for sure!

– Blog six times.Six times exactly, boom.

– Finish reading all the Harry Potter books, including The Cursed Child! HA! I’m still reading the series but I barely read any of the 6th book this month, I think I’m on chapter three. Baby steps.

And September! Fall! Sort of, this DC heat isn’t letting up anytime soon, although Labor Day weekend has been breezy and cool and wonderful. Goals for this month:

–Find and schedule doctor and dentist appointments. Hooray for finally being on insurance again—time to act like an adult and start taking care of myself.

–Reach 10,000 steps a day at least five days a week. My new school is HUGE and I walk around all the time so it looks like this is going to be attainable as long as I don’t come home and immediately plop down on the couch for the entire evening.

–Go to yoga 10 times. This didn’t happen last month but I’ve already got two days in the books this month and I’m hopeful that now that I’ve moved I’ll be more likely to walk to the closest studio after work. Which will also help with the whole 10k steps thing.

–Post on the blog 6 times. This seems to be just ambitious enough while remaining realistic.

–Go see a movie! There are three or four movies coming out this month I want to see (Sully, The Space Between Us, and Edge of Seventeen) and I think it will be a good way to relax.

–Make and stick to a budget. I’m FINALLY getting paid again ($$$$$) and making enough money to actually budget and not just scrape together enough to pay rent each month. This needs to be done ASAP since I checked out my total student loan debt last month and HOLY COW WHY IS HIGHER EDUCATION SO EXPENSIVE.

Alright, signing off to finish out Labor Day weekend and get my teaching life together for the week. Cheers to a four day work week ahead!

Oh boy, just getting in under the wire for this sixth post in August. But hey! I did it! As for my other goals…..well, an update on that for you on Monday most likely.

As I type this I’m sitting in my dark classroom, it’s 7:57AM on a Wednesday. I don’t technically have to be at school until 8AM and the kiddos are here by 8:35AM, but I’ve found it to be so nice to arrive at 7AM and have an hour and a half to get work done. Because by the end of the day the thought of even staying 15 minutes after 3:30PM makes me want to cry.

Why? Because this is hard. I knew it was going to be hard going in, and it’s not different than I expected, I just didn’t know how I would be able to handle it. And now I do! I handle it by crying sometimes, asking for a lot of help (which is humbling and not my strong suit), and by drinking a lot of Diet Coke. Remember when I tried to give soda up for a while? HAH, cute, Em.

Obviously I can’t, and won’t, share many details about what’s going on in my classroom. But it is hard. And good, there are definitely really good parts and really sweet, kind children. Today is the 8th day of school. 172 more days to go. I’m trying to have an attitude that I can only get better at this. I can speak that into existence, right?!

Let’s end this post on a high note, things that are good:

I have very supportive co-workers who not only didn’t get annoyed when I cried but encouraged it.

LABOR DAY WEEKEND IS COMING AND I HAVE THREE DAYS ALL TO MYSELF. Praise the Lord.

I have a beautiful new apartment in a super hip and fun area of town. (Note that I am not hip, just my neighborhood–huge faker over here).

Alright peeps, over and out for August. September goals and an update coming on Monday or Tuesday. And hopefully a tour of the apartment. Enjoy your long weekend–only 2 workdays until we get there.

Guess what?! In the almost year that I abandoned the blog I have been on a total of……….zero dates. Literally, zero. So, the Single Girl Chronicles is alive and well and I’ve got some good stories brewing, despite my lack of a love life.

See, this past year was insane. I was finishing graduate school, student teaching, working as a teacher’s assistant, getting paid almost nothing so shuffling around with different part-time jobs, and just generally so stressed my brain almost exploded. There was no time for even hanging out with friends regularly, let alone dating.

But! It wasn’t that I didn’t want to at all. So occasionally I would download Bumble onto my phone.

Wait, does everyone know what Bumble is? I feel like the majority of my audience here consists of either my married friends or my older family members (shout out Grandma, Terri, Mom, and Dad!) thus, I’ll explain.

Bumble is a dating app, similar to Tinder. You download it on your phone, fill out a profile with pictures and facts about yourself, and set the age and distance you’d prefer for your matches. Then you see a guy’s profile and if you like him, you swipe right. If you don’t, you swipe left. If he also swipes right on your profile then you’re a match! The catch with Bumble is that the girls are only allowed to message the guys first and they only have 24 hours in which to do so. This is mostly to prevent creepers from sending disgusting messages.

This system is my worst nightmare. I’m not clever or funny in an opening message. I prefer to just say “Hey! How’re you?” And literally NO ONE will answer you if you open with that. NO ONE.

So, one day my brother was over at my apartment and decided to take matters into his own hands. You should all know that Alex has dreams of being my “wing man” when he’s (finally) 21 (only one more year!) and is constantly telling me that if I just give him control he could find me a boyfriend.

Yeah, okay, dude.

I passed my phone to him and he got to swiping. Some people say I’m a little picky so I wouldn’t say I agreed with each of his picks, but he had pretty decent taste. After a night of swiping I had 15 matches. Now, for the messaging.

Instead of the casual greeting we decided to go as over the top as possible–cheesy pickup lines. So, we got to googling. We came across the usual sleaze ball options but my favorite one?!

“Were your parents bakers? Because they sure made a cutie pie!”

Hilarious, flirty, obviously a joke. Sold!!

Of the fifteen guys we sent the pick-up line to, I think seven of them answered? Not too shabby! Probably three of them were guys I was interested in.

How many dates did I go on you ask? Oh, that would be zero. Because I’m awkward and prefer sitting on my couch and ended up just stopping messaging them.

But! Lesson learned. Alex was right and being funny and charming works. And the more guys I message the more likely I am to find one I’d actual like to hang out with.

Thursday, July 28, 2016. It was quite the day, wasn’t it? For the first time a major political party in the United States nominated a woman for president. I can’t believe it! I really can’t believe it on two fronts because 1. Gosh, this is such an important thing and I’m so grateful I got to witness it and 2. HOW DID IT TAKE THIS LONG FOR THIS TO HAPPEN?! Geeze, Louise.

I watched the highlights of the DNC all week long. Michelle Obama blew me away, per usual. And I don’t think “when they go low, we go high” is going to stop ringing in my ears anytime soon. I knew all along that it was going to be a huge deal when Hillary officially accepted her nomination. And I knew I would be excited! What I didn’t expect? To pretty much cry the entire night. I do mean the entire night.

I really didn’t expect it.

I agree with most of Hillary Clinton’s platform, we have very similar views, and I admire her greatly. But I spent almost all of 2008 wishing and hoping that Barack Obama would beat her to becoming the presidential nominee in that race. I was enchanted and enthralled and really swept away in the hope of it all. (The boxes full of magazine clippings I have tell a story of a girl that was more obsessed than enchanted–but obsessed doesn’t have the same romantic ring to it). Obviously that worked out in the way I had hoped, and I kind of always knew that Hillary would run this year, but I didn’t think much of it. I guess I sort of took for granted the fact that her running this year was a given.

It has been such a blessing growing up in a time and place where I have always been told, and believed, that I can do and be anything I want. I know that even though we still have a long way to go in terms of gender equality, in the grand scheme of things I’ve been tremendously lucky.

All this to say, I didn’t think that it would be all that big of a deal to watch her accept the nomination. Holy cow was I wrong. It was everything.

These tweets did the best job ever describing it all, better than I can, because really all I could think was “all the feels.”

I'm watching the convention, and I'll say only this:

I did not realize how much this moment meant to me as a woman until right now.

And then Ladybug’s baby sister was born the next afternoon and I started to think about how she’ll never live in a world without a woman as a presidential nominee (and Lord willing, a woman president). How damn cool is that.

It’s just all wonderful and I’m so thrilled and I just continue to think about how great things on the left are because the right side of things makes me imagine the world literally going up in flames. God help us.

I’ll leave you with this tweet because it makes me literally L O L everytime I read it.

So this warm feeling of recognition — all the ways I see myself in Hillary — that's the feeling mediocre white men have felt since 1776?

Damn, Emily, back at it again with the monthly goals post (if there is one thing I’m good at it’s using internet cliches). I think this post is pretty self explanatory, let’s see what I plan to accomplish in the next twenty-five or so days.

August Goals

– Pack and move to a new apartment! In Adams Morgan! With a roommate! On the top floor of a brand new apartment building with A FULL SIZE FRIDGE. God bless.

– Set up my classroom! I’m teaching first grade this year at a new school and I’m feeling all the nerves.

– Go to yoga at least ten times. One of the best parts of 2016 so far has been finding a form of exercise I actually really enjoy, but sometimes sitting on the couch is just so damn tempting.

– Take at least ten evening walks. To clear my head, get some exercise, and keep up with the multitudes of podcasts I’m currently subscribed to.

– Blog six times.

– Finish reading all the Harry Potter books, including The Cursed Child!

So, we’ll see how this goes. But I’m feeling quite good about it all, really.

Well, well, looky here. It works! I can still type! And form sentences! I even remembered how to upload a picture. It’s been almost a year and I have been missing this place lately. I think I quit because it felt like a chore and that was just no fun. But I do miss writing and it doesn’t seem fair to keep all of my rambles contained on Snapchat. So, here I am!

Things will probably be more sporadic around here but you can expect a variety of posts in the next month or so. Things like why I’m obsessed with Hamilton, how much I cried during the DNC, what my goals are in the coming months, and some odd stories about my awkwardness here and there.

To start us off, here’s a picture from my trip to Seattle this past weekend to visit Stink and Squish. Nature is so freaking cool.

– Practice doing planks each morning before work. I’m only devoting five minutes to this which means it’s totally manageable and I can do it. I’ve started a new workout plan that I’m sticking to but not planks. Wish me luck.

– Participate in the 30 day green smoothie challenge over at Simply Green Smoothies.I maybe missed 3 or 4 days but this still counts.

– Have the BEST time at Grace and Roice’s wedding and while visiting Leah and Austen in Durham mid month!The wedding was a huge success and I can’t wait to see the pictures!

– Think of a great Halloween costume idea with Kate and actually make it out to the bar this year–which means no one losing their ID before we even get in the cab (got it, Kate?) We wore cute masks one night and were fantastic flappers the next night! Lots of fun.

November Goals

– Cut myself some slack about posting on the blog. It’s just not happening a lot during this time and that’s just going to have to be okay. I want to put up my goals and currently posts for the rest of the year but other than that I’m not going to let the blog loom over me.

– Keep up with my 5k program and 30 Days of Yoga.

– Finish my Christmas shopping by Nov 30th.

– Run the Greensboro Gobbler for the 4th time.

– Enjoy the few days off that I get for Thanksgiving and hopefully watch the Panthers kick the Cowboys butt that evening!